The Top 3 Reasons You Must Be Running A
Profitable Google AdWords Campaign (plus some
other benefits)
It is my firm belief that your business must have a profitable Google AdWords campaign. There are a number of reasons for this, but I have attempted to at least pull out the top 3 benefits of a profitable Google AdWords campaign and why your business must be running one.
Just quickly, some definitions and explanations so as to have a common understanding.
Pay-per-click Advertising (PPC): Online advertising where you (the advertiser) pays for web site traffic on a per click(visitor) basis. For each click of your PPC ad, one visitor is delivered to your web site. The most common PPC advertising is Google AdWords.
Google AdWords: The advertising system that most of Google's revenues come from. Here is a screengrab of a Google search results page with the Google AdWords ads highlighted in red:
Google clearly marks the AdWords with the words "Sponsored Links".
Now, the reasons I feel so strongly about your business having a profitable Google AdWords campaign are as follows:
1. Free search engine traffic could dry up overnight, while Google AdWords is consistent. Relying only on free search engine traffic is a MASSIVE mistake. It is a mistake because what the search engines give you, the search engines can take away! The infamous "Florida Update" that Google performed on its search engine results in 2003 resulted in many web sites with previously excellent natural rankings being dropped from the search results. The effects were devastating for many of the businesses. Which ones? Those that relied solely on the natural search engine results traffic from Google.
Your marketing needs to be like a stable platform, with many supporting legs. A business built on the one marketing leg of Google natural search engine traffic is one that could topple at any moment. However, with an AdWords campaign you have far more control over the consistency of the traffic you get from the campaign. Changes in the amount of traffic (increases or decreases) are much more gradual.
Free search engine traffic is the cream on the cake, a profitable Google AdWords campaign IS the cake.
2. If you don't develop a profitable Google AdWords campaign, your competitors will. On each page of Google search results, there is space for between 8 and 10 Google AdWords ads. This means that up to 10 of your competitors have the chance to be on the first page of Google. Many will attempt a Google AdWords campaign by themselves and give up after a few months of seeing their AdWords budgets get eaten up for no discernible results.
The others will employ a Google AdWords PPC specialist to design and manage a profitable Google AdWords campaign which will become a vital source of traffic for their web sites. Once 10 of your competitors are entrenched on the 1st page of Google with profitable Google AdWords campaigns it can be very be hard to penetrate that space.
A profitable Google AdWords campaign is a strong marketing competitive advantage.
3. Google AdWords provides excellent intelligence about the type, number and profitability of searches which can then be used for SEO purposes. Google AdWords is one of the most readily measurable types of advertising available. The amount of data about your campaign available through Google AdWords reporting is incredible. This enables the precise tracking of the effectiveness of each search phrase in your campaign. It is easy to determine what the most frequently searched phrases are, what the highest converting (conversion from visitor to lead for example) search phrases are, and what the most profitable search phrases are.
This information can then be used for SEO (search engine optimisation is the process of getting your web site highly ranked in the natural search engine results, the ones down the left hand side of Google for instance) and in doing so get your web site ranked highly in the natural results for the most profitable search phrases.
Until you have this true Google AdWords marketplace information, SEO is simply a "guesstimate".
So, the above 3 reasons make me firmly believe that a Google AdWords campaign is an absolute must for your business. Some other excellent benefits of a Google AdWords campaign are:
* Google AdWords helps establish excellent key performance indicator bench marks. For example, AdWords gives you a firm amount you need to pay for each visitor to your web site (the average cost-per-click amount) and how much you need to pay for each lead or sale (the cost-per-conversion that is setup through the AdWords conversion tracking). These figures are the ones you can then compare all of your other web site traffic sources against so as to determine their effectiveness.
* Google AdWords lets you drive traffic to your web site rapidly. A rough-and-ready Google AdWords campaign can be set-up in a few hours and made live so that traffic is immediately being delivered to your web site. Compare this to SEO which can take months before natural search engine traffic is gained. The speed of deployment of Google AdWords enables you to test new ideas rapidly to determine if there is a market for them.
* Level the demand for your services by turning the Google AdWords campaign on and off as needed. Because your Google AdWords campaign can be turned on or off in a matter of seconds, you effectively have a tap for your web site traffic. This means that if you are inundated with orders or work and can not fulfil any more currently, then you can turn off the AdWords traffic to your web site and delay further orders until you are able to handle more work.
* Control your costs carefully. Google AdWords is a supremely flexible advertising platform. It enables you to set a daily budget of your choosing for your campaign, that once expended, switches off your ads and stops you incurring further advertising costs. So if your daily budget is £10/day or £10,000/day you know that is the total amount you will possibly spend that day.
* Target your market precisely. Aside from cost control, Google AdWords also has a host of features that allow precise targeting of your campaign. It is possible to target geographically. For example, if you wish to just have your AdWords ads appearing for people searching from the South East of England, this is easy to do in a few minutes. It is possible to target by time. For example, if you wish to only have your AdWords ads appear from 10am until 2pm during weekdays, this is easily done in a few minutes. Google AdWords give enormous control over your campaigns.
* Google AdWords gives excellent brand exposure. Because you only pay for the visitor (click), not the viewing of each of your ads, your brand name can be getting seen thousands of times per day - for free! If you have had a professional campaign constructed this can mean that a searcher may click on your ad, review your site and then move on, but that eventually they come back to your site and make an enquiry/purchase simply because every time they do a search in your search phrase marketplace that they see one of your ads, which establishs in their mind you as the leading company for that product or service.
1stPageProphets is a Google AdWords qualified professional, has set up numerous professional Google AdWords campaigns from scratch and also resuscitated clients' DIT (do-it-themselves) Google AdWords campaigns that were failing miserably. We are very happy to give you advice on any of the above, to recommend further Google AdWords resources, or to construct a professional Google AdWords campaign for you so please contact us now.
This article may be freely reprinted as long as the resource box below remains intact (including the hyperlink) with the article.
Mike Bradley is founder of 1stPageProphets, who provide services to drive hungry, qualified buyers to your web site using natural and paid search engine results and ads. Find out what is holding your web site back from more buyers by going to http://www.1stpageprophets.com now.
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